2.1.2-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 2.1.2 Hougomont I find it really funny that Hugo is writing about a place he went called Hougomont around where Waterloo was fought. Napoleon had a brother named Jerome? Is that a literal brother? Jerome and Napoleon do not sound anything like each other. But then maybe Napoleon was a perfectly normal name back before, well, Napoleon Napoleonized everything. I recently discovered my friend has a Napoleon thing but I keep getting hung up on the fact he relegalized slavery and public branding. Let’s take a moment to appreciate “Kellermann’s balls were exhausted on this heroic section of wall.” Some people died in a perfectly ordinary-looking doorway and the area has really gone to hell since the battle. I wonder what the people who lived here made of Hugo fanboying over this? The French got fired on a lot from every angle but it’s Waterloo so what do you expect? A massacre in a chapel? How very tasteless. I’ve been reading about a lot of those lately, not all of them fictional. A decapitated Jesus statue. That does not bode well for anything. The French text here looks like Spanish to me, Portuguese to Google, but I’m pretty sure is actually French. It’s in a French book taking place in France and mentions a Marques. Armed corpses are so strangely sad. Oh, wow, no one uses the well anymore because of all the bodies. Okay then. I mean, I wouldn’t either. I don’t even want to know how Hugo can possibly know who the last person to draw water from the well was, especially since he was just some random peasant. Hugo, this is supposed to be the true chapters about things that actually happened. Did they take down the name of the guy they were forcing to wait on them? It’s not very practical to make one guy do all of it. And he sounds Dutch, this van Kylsom. Why would they be in such a hurry to get rid of bodies that they threw them in a well? That’s not very respectful so if they’re not going to bother with that then why not just leave them where they were? And apparently some of them were still breathing when they were put in there and that is the stuff of nightmares. Did anyone rescue any of the feeble voices calling for help? Did that old woman REALLY remember Waterloo at three or has she just been told stories about it for so long that she’s developed a false memory? As a psych person, I am very interested in this. And of course the orchard is sentient in May. So a bunch of people I’ve never heard of died at Waterloo. I may yet hear more about them in the coming chapters. Commentary Alasse-irena So you piqued my curiosity re the names, and I did a little bit of research for you (by which I mean I read Napoleon’s wikipedia article). The rest of his siblings were Joseph, Lucien, Elisa, Louis, Pauline, Caroline and Jerome. I guess Napoleon was just a more normal name back then. In other news - I think it’s entirely possible that the old woman had memories from the age of three especially since the memory she’s telling us about is more a flash of imagery than it is any sort of coherent narrative… I offer you the dubious support of anecdotal evidence: many people I know have maybe a handful of brief memories from that age, and I can imagine the battle of Waterloo would imprint itself on one’s mind somewhat.